Focus

World reaction to PISA

Much of the media coverage around this year's PISA focused on how Asian students outperformed the rest of the world. But regular followers of the OECD’s assessment of worldwide student performance had something else on their minds: where’s Finland?

They weren’t the only ones feeling troubled: “The golden days are over,” lamented Finnbay, a Finnish media outlet, as it reported that Finland, long a PISA poster-child, had “dropped from the top of the league.” Yle, the national broadcaster, even wondered if the country’s education system might be at risk of sharing “the fate of another fallen national champion – Nokia.” Numerous explanations were offered for the Nordic country’s performance, including that it may be a victim of its own PISA success.

“Some argue that complacency and focus on explaining the past to thousands of education tourists have shifted attention away from developing Finland’s own school system,” wrote Pasi Sahlberg, who works on education reform in Finland. In response, Finland’s education minister, Krista Kiuru, promised “strong action,” according to Finnbay. There was handwringing, too, across the border: “No other country has fallen so abruptly as Sweden in maths over a ten-year span,” announced The Local, a Swedish news outlet.

Tremors from the Nordic countries’ PISA showing were felt in the United Kingdom, where the Financial Times reported that the performance of the country’s students was “stagnating”. That, combined with the results of Finland and Sweden in PISA, put the education minister, Michael Gove, “under pressure to defend his Scandinavian-inspired education reforms,” according to the FT. In response, it wrote, Mr Gove said “a ‘more rigorous system of accountability’ was also needed to make sure that poor performance did not go unchecked.

As well as looking at national results, the media also examined PISA itself. In The Guardian, Mona Chalabi discussed “the basic claim of the assessment – that it is able to accurately capture the full range of students’ abilities and compare them across the world.” (You can find some FAQs about PISA’s methodology and approach here.) There was discussion, too, of the usefulness of international comparisons in education. Writing in a Washington Post blog before the PISA release, Valerie Strauss warned about the “fetishization of international test scores”. As The Economist noted, however, “critics will point out the rankings have imperfections. But it gives us a clue to how successful our classrooms are—and that is hard to ignore.”

Away from making international comparisons, PISA also looks into how factors outside the classroom affect student performance, most notably, perhaps, social background. The importance of some of these seemed to receive particular recognition in France, where Libération (in French) described the country as the “world champion in education inequalities”.

Writing on The Huffington Post, Jacques Attali, a leading economist and public intellectual in France, warned that the relatively weak performance of disadvantaged children in France’s schools posed an existential crisis for his country: “Unless this changes, millions of talented individuals … will be lost, and they will leave, frustrated, to go to other countries or underground. France will lose her soul in this. And her future.”

What about the “winners” – the Chinese city of Shanghai as well as OECD Members like Japan and Korea, among other Asian economies, that topped the PISA tables? While their achievements in education were widely recognized, there was concern, too, about the price being paid by the region’s hard-working students.

Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper noted that while Korean students performed well in PISA, the results also demonstrated that “they showed a lack of interest in the subjects.” This is sometimes attributed to the relentless pressure on Korean kids to succeed, which sees many follow an intensive eight-hour day in school with another three or four hours in an evening cram-school.

“For South Korean teenagers a double shift of school, every week day, is just a way of life,” the BBC’s Reeta Chakrabarti reported. But there are signs of a shift in attitudes, she added, quoting the country’s education minister, Seo Namsoo: “We still have a long way to go,” he said, “but we are doing some soul-searching in our society, and our goals now are about how to make our people happier.”

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“With high levels of youth unemployment, rising inequality and a pressing need to boost growth in many countries, it’s more urgent than ever that young people learn the skills they need to succeed,” says OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría in this PISA video: http://youtu.be/6yhiGj-252k

Explore the performance of individual countries and the impact of factors like gender and social background with this data visualisation tool.